I made my way back to the start-and-finish box hanging on to the nearside stirrup leather with my right hand, because my right leg wasn't working very well. By the time I got back to the stables, the feeling was returning to my leg. But the end of my collar bone was causing me very serious pain and it appears that I had been very lucky (a) not to have broken my collar bone, and (b) not to have dislocated it.
The pain was the result of the end of the bone sinking back into the socket from whence it had nearly been ejected. This information was not available to me at the time, so I was perhaps not as grateful as I might have been that the pain and inconvenience could have been worse. If it had been a little bit worse, I would have been unconscious and therefore relatively unaffected.
I returned with my father to Balmoral, where he very kindly arranged for Sir Charles Strong to come and treat my shoulder and leg, which got me back on an even keel a lot quicker than if I'd been left to my own devices. As it turned out, my shoulders have never been even since then - the right is marginally shorter than the left, but not enough for anybody except the dressmaker to notice!
Princess Anne on permanently altering her collar bone after a fall at the 1973 European Eventing Championships in Kiev
‘Riding Through My Life’ by Princess Anne (1991)
